Bring on the Thunder
by SimplyAlexei
Summary: A small drabble based on the idea of what might happen if the lightning storm during the beach episode had hit ten minutes earlier.


Mother Nature is a fickle woman known for winding winds and stirring storms with the flick of her wrist, the size and speed of which can only be tracked vaguely and unreliably at best by man. Narrowing down a storm front by hours is difficult. Doing so by the minute is nearly impossible.

Fate might tell you that a ten minute difference between when the first bolt of a lightning storm strikes is all it takes to change everything.

Haruhi placed a weak hand on the bathroom door, her palm gliding down the polished wood as she nudged it open. Her entire body felt weak in that post vomiting haze that reminded her of her childhood sick days eating chicken soup and feeling her mother's hand in her own clammy ones. Even after rinsing her mouth out several times she could still taste the crab tinted bile in the back of her throat. She would need to find her toothbrush once she figured out what part of the villa that she ended up in during her haste to find an appropriate place to vomit; goodness knows that she wouldn't be eating anything crustacean in nature for a long time after this incident.

"Where am I?" she wondered aloud to herself, regretting again not keeping her wits more about her.

"Are you alright?" a soft baritone voice answered her pondering as she stepped from the bathroom into the main living space of the suite. She was greeted by the sight of a shirtless and lanky male body lounging comfortable in a plush chair. A small towel blocked his face from her view as he continues to lazily dry his hair.

Slightly panicked at her own apparent rudeness in barging into an occupied room, Haruhi quickly bowed in apology. "I am sorry, sir. I didn't mean to intrude."

"Don't be silly." As she straightened, she caught the tail end of a hand lazily pulling the towel off of still damp hair to rest instead on the figure's neck and shoulders, revealing the familiar identity of the room's occupant. "It's just me," Kyoya sighed with his eyes comfortable closed, a sight that drew Haruhi's attention briefly to his lack of glasses.

"Kyoya," she breathed in recognition, her shoulders hitching slightly in surprise. He didn't respond to his name falling past her lips, instead continuing to dry the ends of his hair. The lull in exchanged words was enough to remind Haruhi of the guilt that had begun to eat at her once she'd earlier understood the extent of everyone's worry. "I'm sorry," she began, making him once again pause his ministrations. "It really wasn't my intention to cause you all to worry about me today."

Kyoya turned his head and eyes toward her, his calculating gaze that much more piercing without his glasses to act as a barrier. The pit in her stomach could be mostly attributed to guilt but there was also a distinct spark of something else that made her breath catch. It wasn't a feeling that she was completely unfamiliar with, despite what the other hosts might assume. She wasn't oblivious to the handsome med that surrounded her on a day to day basis, and the inklings of physical attraction had pulled her eyes to each and every one of them, sans maybe Honey, at one point or another. There was, to her at least, a distinct difference between acknowledging that attraction - a perfectly natural response to hormones, pheromones, and symmetrical features - and confusing it for infatuation or worse, love. Haruhi was a logical person with a logical understanding of her emotions and more important aspirations than batting her eyelids at pretty boys who made her heart flip.

"Thanks, but I wasn't especially worried." Kyoya shifted up and out of his seat, the lean muscles of his bare arm sliding underneath his skin as he pushed himself into a standing position, somehow doing so with more elegance than Haruhi felt she had ever displayed in her life. He pulled a bottle of water to his lips; where it came from, she couldn't even begin to tell you. Her maintained eye contact as he swallowed, analyzing her even as he too the moment to quench his thirst. Or, perhaps, taking a moment to quench his thirst simply to analyze her. "Although," He continued as if it were just an afterthought. "I did have a hard time separating Kaoru and Hikaru from those two punks." Haruhi shifted uncomfortably. Something about the way he spoke gave her the distinct impression that the effort he put toward that particular situation was half-hearted at best. His following chuckle was dark and sent a phantom shiver down her spine as he said, "they almost beat them half to death."

Haruhi's brow twitched at his indifference toward the implied violence he'd allowed on his watch. Part of her was flatter at the protective nature of her friends, though the other part of her - the part that aspired to be a lawyer, and thus an enforcer of the law - was offended that they had the audacity to commit assault on her behalf.

"And because of you," Kyoya continues, cutting off her train of thought. He meandered past her, towering in such a way that was not entirely uncomfortable as her brushed past. "I had to send each of the girls a bouquet of flowers to apologize." A stray from of water trailed down the side of his neck from his still damp hair, soaking into the towel he'd settled over his shoulders. "They've been looking forward to this trip and we don't want to disappoint them."

"I'll pay for the flowers," she assured him as he reached a specific spot along the wall, pressing his palm to the sliding switch that controlled the lights in the room.

He glanced back her way, cynical humor shining in his eyes. "Each bouquet cost me fifty thousand. That's a grand total of six hundred thousand out of pocket, Haruhi." Suddenly, the room darkened as he slid the dimmer down.

Haruhi's head tilted in confusion. "Uh," she paused, acutely aware of exactly how close Kyoya was to her and how much more intimate her presence was in the darkness, the only clear sound aside from his soft breath being the wind pressing against the walls around them.

"If you want to," he spoke softly but purposefully, leaning down until their faces were level, and her heart gave a familiar jolt as suddenly she felt so intimidated that it was like her nerves had short circuited and disconnected themselves from her ability to fully comprehend and reason. She wasn't afraid as his next words hit her ears, but was frozen in place nonetheless. "You can pay me back with your body."

The next series of events happened in quick succession, leaving Haruhi wide-eyed and breathless.

Kyoya's hand was surprisingly cool on her wrist as a reached out and pulled her across the room. She tripped over her own feet more than once, though Kyoya steadied her with surprisingly gentle hands despite his serious expression. He turned her toward him, and she almost questioned what he was doing until he gently pushed her back. Off balance, the back of her knees hit the bed and she inhaled in surprise as the brief sensation of weightlessness overtook her before her body finally bounced airily against the silken sheets that covered his bed. It was like she was in a trance as he climbed above her, confused and unsure of what exactly was going through his head. Again, not scared, but her senses were heightened and her nerves on end.

Her hovered, his face once again level with her own, though he was silent this time as their eyes locked. The tension was palpable as her chest heaved and her lips parted. We wasn't even touching her, but tt was as if she could be completely engulfed by him, his arms and legs trapping her in a cage of muscle and body heat. Her lounging gown may have been long and modest, but she felt oddly exposed by his piercing gaze.

"Surely, you're not so naive as to actually believe a person's sex doesn't matter." His breath caressed her face, cause loose strands of her hair to skitter and resettle. The resulting shiver started on the top of her head and traveled just under her skin all the way down to her toes. If he notices, he chose not to comment on the reaction. "You've left yourself completely defenseless against me," he continued instead.

Haruhi gasped, light and shallow, as the connection clicked in her brain. His eyes narrowed at nearly the same increment that hers widened. There was a pregnant pause before she announced, soft but sure of herself, "you won't do it, Kyoya." Surprised flickered across his face for the briefest of moments before he schooled if back to something more neutral. "I know, because it wouldn't benefit-" her sentence cut off by a barely suppressed scream.

Kyoya jolted back, the intimacy of the moment shattering as her body jerked suddenly into a quivering fetal position beneath him.

He panicked for an instant, not expecting for his actions to have actually caused her legitimate fear. His mind quickly put the pieces together as another flash of lightly lit the room, swiftly followed by an additional full and loud rumbling of thunder directly overhead.

"Haruhi," he said her name a bit more forcefully than he would under different circumstances, trying to draw her out of her seemingly instinctual reaction to one of Mother Nature's more vocal incarnations. "Haruhi," he said again, placing a palm on her chin to turn her resistant face toward him. Another round of of thunder shook the room and she buried her face into that hand, her own fingers hastily grabbing onto his arm. He grunted as her clinging caused him to lose balance and fall onto his elbow, half of his body now sprawled over her own. She hardly seemed to notice, borrowing into his chest to hide from the sights and sounds of the storm.

He ran over his option as her quaking racked his body. Kyoya was not a man with irrational fears, at least to his knowledge thus far, but he could easily recognize the presence of one in another person, especially someone as highly logical as Haruhi. There was no way that her almost rabid need to hide away from the electrically charged atmospheric particles was due to any sort of logical reasoning on her part. He was unsure of how to fully proceed but growing up under the thumb of the largest medical tycoon in the country gave him some familiarity with panicked patients.

He shifted so that his body weight wouldn't make her uncomfortable, letting her curl into him. Giving control even in the smallest forms, he recalled, was key to comforting someone in a situation where they feel they lacked control. He used his free arm to reach around her and grasp the sheets, tugging at them and pulling the section that wasn't already pinned by their combined bodies over and around Haruhi as another protective layer again at least the flashes of lightning, if nothing else.

"Haruhi," he spoke softly, comfortingly, running his hand through her hair. The evening had most certainly gone in the opposite direction from anything that he had expected, and Kyoya being who he is wasn't entirely secure in his newly assigned role as protector over the young honor student. The irony of him being the one to discover Haruhi's fear after a long day of the other's efforts to uncover it did not escape him. There was a small part of him that, for a brief moment, considered adding onto her debt for the inconvenience of having to comfort her, but it was quickly overruled by the more sentimental but less often seen side of him that lectured him for even considering taking advantage of her vulnerable state in such a way. Besides, it really wasn't a huge inconvenience to hold her in his arms like this, especially after the worry that had gripped him at the sight of her tumbling down the side of a cliff and into the ocean.

If his arms tightened, neither of them acknowledged it.

"I'm sorry," a muffled voice catch his ears from the woman still clinging to his bare torso. He was quiet, still carding his fingers without thought through her hair underneath her silken shield. "I don't normally cling like this."

Haruhi shoulders, which had been tight and tense with fearful surprise at the sudden onset of the storm, loosened just a touch as she felt the vibrations of Kyoya's chuckle settle them. "Knowing what I know about you, it's likely that you simply didn't have anyone to cling to. You're so highly independent that I doubt even Ranka is aware of your disinclination towards thunder."

Haruhi would neither confirm nor deny the statement, but Kyoya took it as a confession of guilt nonetheless.

Despite the sound of the storm thundering in the background, and the flashes of light that still snuck past, Haruhi felt safe in the arms of the shadow king. The wind became the sound of his breath, and the thunder was fought off by his heart thudding in her ear. Outside of her initial, and quite literal, knee jerk reaction, this was the calmest she'd ever been when faced with her fear. Part of her wondered at whether it was the presence of another person or Kyoya in particular that eased her worried.

"Kyoya?" Both of them froze as the door opened and Tamaki's voice came floating in. "Do you have any lo.." he trailed off, and Kyoya expected him to explode upon finding the two of them seemingly locked in an embrace, though he honestly couldn't see the outrage that was surely evident in the blonde's eyes with his back to the door. He waiting in bated breath for the ensuing tantrum, but surprisingly there was simply quiet followed by the soft click of the suite door shutting.

A heavy breath escaped both hosts, the tension slipping away as easily and it crept up.

He must not have seen her in the darkness, Kyoya thought to himself.

"Kyoya?" This time the question came from Haruhi.

"Yes?"

She shifted, hugging him closer to her. "Thank you."


End file.
